Harvard shocked by Canada’s rejection of Ignatieff

Boston’s chattering classes are struggling with the stunning political defeat of one of Harvard’s most popular academics at the hands of Canadian voters, painting Michael Ignatieff’s historic loss as Liberal leader as a new low in Canadian politics.

A series of editorials and articles published this week in the Harvard Crimson, Boston Globe and elsewhere have blamed Canadians for being close-minded and anti-American when they handed Mr. Ignatieff and the Liberals the party’s worst defeat in history.

“Harvard sees itself as the centre of the universe, so I’m sure it felt it very deeply,” said Graham Wilson, chair of Boston University’s department of political science.

In a front page article, The Boston Globe said the main reason for the Liberal collapse was that Mr. Ignatieff — the former director Harvard’s Carr Center of Human Rights Policy and an expert on international military interventions — had views on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan that had pushed “war-weary voters toward the more left-leaning New Democratic Party.”

The paper’s editorialists noted with some disbelief that Canadian politics had become “surprisingly caustic” and described the “sadness and indignation” his former Harvard colleagues felt at seeing that Conservative attack ads painting Mr. Ignatieff as a foreign Ivy League elitist had played so well with Canadian voters.

“For a country that is stereotyped here in the U.S. as a country that is accepting of everyone and everything, this federal election depicts a Canada that is moving in a steadily more exclusive and narrow direction,” wrote Shalini K. Rao, a Canadian student, in the Harvard Crimson newspaper.

It was a tough lesson in humility for one of the world’s most prestigious universities that while a former student could be elected president — and the first black one at that — its star professor couldn’t win his seat in a Canadian riding.

“I think they’re unhappy that his time spent in the U.S. at Harvard ended up hurting him not really helping him in the election,” said Paul Cellucci, former U.S. ambassador to Canada and a former governor of Massachusetts. “They’re not happy about that and I don’t blame them. You would think that spending time in Harvard would have a positive impact on your future career path.”

The reaction to Mr. Ignatieff’s defeat has focused largely on trying to explain how his reputation as one of Harvard’s most respected professors, a charismatic intellectual who could pack classrooms and once graced the cover of GQ magazine, could have worked against him with voters.

Mark Leccese, a journalism professor and media blogger at Boston.com, wrote that Mr. Ignatieff’s colleagues were dismayed that negative connotations about Harvard — long a code word in U.S. political rhetoric for “out-of-touch elitist” — seemed to have crossed the border into Canada.

“If Ignatieff had been a professor at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, would the ad have been as powerful?” he wrote.

But U.S. commentators trying to make sense of Mr. Ignatieff’s defeat seem to have little understanding of how well political ads questioning Mr. Ignatieff’s time abroad played with Canadian voters, Mr. Cellucci said.

“They don’t fully appreciate that as great a relationship as we have, the United States and Canada, as close as we are, it’s important to Canadians to be Canadian, not American,” he said. “I think that’s the point that they’re all missing and this effort by the Conservative party that kind of turned Michael Ignatieff into an American, that’s what really hurt the most. I don’t think some of the commentators are aware of how deeply Canadians want to be different than Americans.”

However, those commentators who pay close attention to Canadian politics would likely be more surprised that a renowned scholar had even become head of a political party in the first place, something that would rarely happen in the U.S., Mr. Wilson said.

“Being an academic would not be a good start in this country and being an academic who had spent a long time outside of the United States is a double whammy,” he said. “People would be less surprised that it happened and was done badly but that it happened at all.”

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